This may not come as a big surprise, given that they've won 11 of the last 12 Heisman Trophies, but college football's quarterbacks have never been better.

Last season, according to an NCAA statistic called passing-efficiency rating, major-college quarterbacks achieved their highest average score of all time.

But there's something about this particular golden age of quarterbacking that's different from any other before it—and it reflects a fundamental shift in the way quarterbacks are chosen and coached. These days, to put it in the simplest possible terms, anything goes. The only similarity the top college quarterbacks share is their astonishing lack of similarity.

Florida State's Jameis Winston, whose unbeaten No. 3 Seminoles take on unbeaten No. 7 Miami on Saturday, may be the exemplar of the age. It's strange enough that he's a redshirt freshman who didn't enroll in college early as so many top quarterbacks do these days, or that he still wants to play for the school's baseball team. In an era where running quarterbacks get the most attention, the 6-foot-4 Winston is something of a throwback. He's a traditional NFL-style passer who prefers to throw from the pocket rather than juking and scrambling with the ball. He chose the Seminoles over Alabama and Stanford, teams that like football the way it was played in the 1940s.

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Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel
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If Winston has a polar opposite, it might be Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel, the reigning Heisman winner and another top NFL prospect. Under the Aggies' offense, Manziel usually takes the snap from the shotgun formation, which puts him a few yards behind center. From there, he can go anywhere. Sometimes he drops back and launches an off-balance pass from the pocket. Other times he performs all manner of ballet until he finds an open receiver. Other times he just takes off running. Last season, he rushed for a whopping 108 yards per game.

But the most curious difference between these two involves an old coaching bias. For many years, college coaches had a favorite type of passer: "That 6-foot-5, 230-pound quarterback who threw it 80 yards," said Taylor Barton, a former quarterback at Washington who runs a football academy in the Pacific Northwest. The majority of these players were white. Most black quarterbacks who won starting jobs in college were expected, or encouraged, to run more.

Many black players who had been quarterbacks in high school were shunted into cornerback or receiver positions when they got to college because of stereotypes or pushback from boosters, said Bill Curry, a former Kentucky and Alabama coach.

Coaches say the quarterback who knocked down that unspoken wall, proving that quarterbacks could be runners and passers, was Michael Vick. Not only did he lead the nation in passing as a redshirt freshman at Virginia Tech in 1999, he also managed to average 53 rushing yards per game. His team reached the national-title game that season.

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Oregon's Marcus Mariota
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What happened in the 2000s, Curry said, is that coaches stopped stereotyping so much and started allowing their best athletes to compete at quarterback—no matter what they looked like. The numbers bear this out: From 2000 to 2010, according to a Journal analysis, college-football teams in major conferences played twice as many black quarterbacks as they did during the 1980s.

The last decade has also hastened the end of another homogenizing force: the tendency of college coaches to use predictable formations, play calls and traditional pre-snap huddles. In the mid-2000s, as more dual-threat quarterbacks like Vick emerged in college, offenses and defenses both started looking for new ways to speed up or slow down, to outrun rather than outmuscle, or to hide their intentions by lining up in formations that suggested one thing but really meant something else.

As coaches ditched their preconceptions about quarterbacks, some decided to throw out their old laminated playbooks and try innovations—most of them variations on the "spread" or "read-option" offenses. Others went back and dusted off those traditions and started playing football the way it was played in the era of leather helmets.

In either case, the core principle was the same: They tailored the offense to better fit the abilities of the best quarterback they had.

Quarterbacks have been better in the air and on the ground since then. From 2000 to 2004, quarterbacks on top-10 teams rushed for an average of 146 yards per season, a number that almost doubled to 314 yards between 2005 and 2012. Quarterbacks such as Manziel and Ohio State's Braxton Miller on the country's 10 best teams rushed for almost 500 yards on average last season, the most ever.

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Oregon's Marcus Mariota—the current Heisman favorite—stands squarely among this new breed of idiosyncratic quarterbacks. A native of Hawaii, he has the height of a classic pocket passer but also has the speed of a wide receiver. And he has an advanced football mind: In the Ducks' no-huddle offense, Mariota hustles to the line, reads the defense and makes split-second decisions about whether to hand off the ball, keep it or pass. All three can devastate.

"Now defenses can't line up and pin their ears back and just go get the quarterback," said Darnell Arceneaux, an ex-Utah quarterback who coached Mariota in high school. "There's too much for them to think about."

On the other side of the equation is Mariota's possible opponent in the BCS title game: No. 1 Alabama's AJ McCarron. McCarron, who already has two national titles, is basically your father's quarterback. He's a tall kid with unremarkable speed who lines up behind Alabama's top-drawer offensive line, takes the snap, stands in the pocket like a totem pole and paints the field with perfect passes.

The result of all this is that college football is now completely unpredictable. Stereotypes no longer apply: not just for quarterbacks, but offenses themselves. The version of the spread that Manziel uses at Texas A&M isn't what Mariota runs at Oregon or what won Cam Newton his Heisman at Auburn in 2010.

Even the Baylor offense that won a Heisman for Robert Griffin III in 2011 is better. The team's new quarterback, Bryce Petty, has the Bears averaging 64 points per game by stretching the football field to extremes, forcing defenses to cover far too much ground. Petty, who has his team ranked No. 6, is on pace to have one of the most improbable statistical seasons in college football history.

If you're being precise about it, you might say the new motto for quarterbacks is everything goes. "Unless you're dressing 12 defenders," said ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit, "then you cannot stop these offenses."

A good article, but readers should be reminded that "your father's quarterback" and another similar have won 3 of the last 4 titles and are favored again this year. Teams win games, players win awards.

"quarterbacks on top-10 teams rushed for an average of 146 yards per season, a number that almost doubled to 314 yards between 2005 and 2012." 146+146 = 292; therefore, 314 is MORE than double. Evidently, you didn't spend much time in a math classroom.

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